Exploring the Conté tools to do a portrait of this female actress ( Maggie Q ) from Mission impossible.

Here is a prime example of why this site was made.
This client had a memorable photo he took that had some camera flash artifacts.
Not only was i able to restore this precious photo, but add him into the moment.

I have always loved concept art of all type, you can get so much out of so little. Here are my first attempts.
The first was done in painter mostly and was based off a crappy phone camera shot i took one cloudy day.
The second was a tutorial i saw on deviant art, i followed it but modified the (desert/broken spaceship) for a (ocean/submarine) theme instead. The last was drawn over a female krump dancer off google images which i modified to be male and did the rest free hand to express the motion of aggressive dancing.

In this piece we started with a regular photograph (far left) in photoshop. Retouching blemishes, blurring skin, darkening and lightening hot spots (middle).
Next we take the touched up photo to painter and start cloning, i used oil cloners mostly, i left a brush stroke look on the outside to eliminate the background distractions. I wasn’t totally satisfied with some details so i took the final painter image back into photoshop, and put the (middle shot) as a layer on top. I masked in certain areas around the mouth, eyes and nose i wanted to be photographic crisp. I finished off by cleaning the reflections on the eyes.

Here is the same case study, new fruit and new application. This digital painting was done using the photograph in the top left. This time i used only photoshop, and it’s brushes.
I accidentally flattened the initial sketch sorry!
Then you can see i blocked in the basic colours with a size size 60 brush at about 60% opacity 100% hardness. The file size was 8″x8″ 300dpi.

After i lowered the brush opacity to 20% to blend the colours and often used a smaller size 30 brush, still 100% hardness. Keep sampling the blended overlapping colours and brush till you are get a nice gradient.

For a finishing touch i applied a texture to the brush to get a fuzzy, spotted look on some highlights. I never used any blur, smudge, dodge or burn tools at all.